Transforming Education through Edutainment
[Music]
i want to begin today
by taking a walk down memory lane i want
you all to think back
to your years in school think those
mornings walking down the hall to your
classroom
the announcements blaring off of the
intercom the smell of your science
textbook at nine in the morning
now think about what kind of student you
were
perhaps you were that straight a student
you aced all your tests
did all your homework or maybe you
weren’t so great of a student
maybe you struggled in class or you
didn’t care
or you had other priorities i was
somewhere in the middle
my grades were decent enough in school
enough to make my parents happy and my
teachers content
i did okay in most of my subjects but i
was very average
as far as a student goes in fact i was
so unremarkable
i remember one time in the fourth grade
when her teacher was handing out holiday
cards to all the students in the class
before the holiday break realizing she
hadn’t given me mine
i walked up to her desk and asked her
where’s my card
i then saw the look of shock on her face
when she realized she didn’t write me
one
as if that wasn’t bad enough she then
opens her drawer
pulls out a blank card and writes one
there in front of me
really that’s just an example but i was
a very
very average student however
one fateful day everything changed
there was an event that completely
changed my life
altered my career and transformed my way
of thinking
and that day was hat day
hat day was an annual tradition at our
school one day a year
all the students would wear some silly
hat and whoever wore the silliest hat
won a prize now i never participated in
it
in fact it wasn’t even a big deal at all
but this year was different
a group of my friends were talking in
the cafeteria about which hat they were
going to wear the next day
they asked me what hat are you wearing i
didn’t know
i hadn’t thought about it i wasn’t
planning on participating
but the question did stay on my mind the
rest of the day
i went home and i ate dinner and i
started working on my homework
assignment
due the next day the homework assignment
was a science project
we were to create a display on dinosaurs
and what we knew about them
and then i had an idea and i thought to
myself
what if i made my science project my hat
so i went to my mom and i told her my
idea and my mom the most supportive
person in the world was ecstatic
she told me yes let’s do this let’s
figure this out
so we worked all evening stayed up till
two or three in the morning
brainstorming and finding crafting
materials around the house
play-doh toys aluminum foil blocks
whatever we could find
and we created a dinosaur paradise in a
hat
we took an aluminum tray turned it
upside down
put a bowl under it that would fit on my
head then on top of this tray
we created this dinosaur field we put
some boulders and some trees and some
bushes and
we created some leaf-eating dinosaurs
eating the trees and meat-eating
dinosaurs eating the leaf-eating
dinosaurs
over on this corner of the tray we had
two dinosaurs fighting over on this
corner of the tray
we had a dinosaur falling off of the hat
hanging by a string
so when i put on the head and walked it
would sway back and forth
i was so excited the next day at school
i can tell you i was no longer
unremarkable
everyone was so excited about looking at
my hat
and asking me questions students and
teachers alike
were so so excited to see the dinosaurs
living the dinosaur life on top of my
head
at the end of that very awesome day i
heard on the announcement that i had one
hat day
and better yet i got an a on my
assignment
that was such a memorable experience to
me and particularly because it got me
excited
it got me excited about school about
doing something that i previously wasn’t
very excited about
now i didn’t know it then but i was
applying early foundational concepts of
edutainment
today i want to talk to you all about
edutainment
what is it well grammatically it’s just
the blending of two words
entertainment and education you may have
heard it in various other formats
you may have heard infotainment you may
have heard gamification that’s the new
buzzword nowadays
where you take gaming elements and
applying them to non-gaming curriculum
to make things more exciting they all
mean the same thing
in fact gamification is just a specific
form
of the wider umbrella of edutainment and
it’s where you create
some kind of educational or entertaining
program or activity or some object
that has an educational purpose
compare that with the lecture the
lecture is the oldest form
of teaching spanning thousands of years
and the concept is simple one person
talks
one person listens and thus learning
happens
now edutainment takes that concept a
step further
instead of focusing on just the content
of what is being learned
it focuses on the method of delivery how
we’re delivering that content
is just as important in order for
learning to take place
we have evidence of edutainment as early
as the 1900s
when classrooms had paper-based games
to get kids educated and engaged in that
education
but as technology has continued to
evolve
so has the opportunities for edutainment
programs
in 1969 sesame street
came to television screens all across
the country and it revolutionized
education
it took phonics and numbers and letters
to children at home something they
traditionally only did at school
and they loved it
that inspired so many more programming
after that
in 1971 the electric company
also was introduced following the
success of sesame street
now teaching stem subjects to children
at home
and also with a really awesome theme
song for those of you who remember
it was amazing but 1971 was also an
important year
because that was the release of another
edutainment favorite
oregon trail a game that is nostalgic
for many here
it is a game a survival game where
students would learn about that period
of time
but it was important simply because now
there was two-way communication
rather than just sitting there and
listening and watching they can provide
input
now the learning was even more engaging
this continued in 1983 with the release
of the video game math blaster
this game allowed students to solve math
problems to shoot enemy spaceships
now making math enjoyable and accessible
to children now it didn’t stop there
edutainment continued to evolve as
technology allowed it to
then came the simulators simulated video
games for everything
teaching kids how to cook how to build
cities how to build roller coasters
how to perform surgery most recently
last year we had the release of
microsoft flight simulator 2020
which allows you to fly a realistic
aircraft in a
photorealistic depiction of real-world
environments
now edutainment doesn’t have to be
high-tech there’s plenty of
non-technology related entertainment
programs
one professor created a graphic novel to
teach cell biology to students
a card game was developed to teach
nursing students
about various health concepts various
theater games and improv games have been
developed
to teach pre-service teachers how to
work in a multicultural classroom
the possibilities are endless so when i
was a teenager i was inspired
as i took from that example on hat day i
decided i want to do more with
edutainment
so while other kids were outside playing
i was inside at home
experimenting tinkering now i wasn’t a
computer was
i can’t say i was very good at computer
programming but i did what i could with
what i had
using powerpoint microsoft powerpoint
and nothing but hyperlinks and hundreds
of slides
i created a choose your own adventure
point-and-click game
called virtual life in this game
the player took the form of an infant
and would make
small little decisions that would create
branching paths
and based on those branching paths they
would grow up and live different lives
and depending on what decisions they
made through every stage of their life
they’d have a bad ending a good ending
or a great ending
and the goal of the game was to get the
best ending possible
now this game wasn’t in any way polished
it used stock sound effects and clipart
images
but of the few people that played it
they loved it
they loved it so much the concept about
it that i created an expansion pack
using hundreds of more slides
where now you can play virtual life and
live the life of an animal
you can live the life of a turtle or a
fish and in addition to making survival
decisions you learn about their life
cycles
i loved it i was inspired i decided to
then a few years later take the concept
even further
i volunteered at a summer program for
first graders and i took the idea of
virtual life and instead created a
different kind of game
called a pirate adventure the first
graders would play the role of a cartoon
pirate sailing the seven seas and
they would learn vocabulary words and
concepts relating to boats and ships
and geography and oceans this time it
was more polished
it was fully narrated
it was so much more complex with better
animations
better sound better visuals and the kids
loved it
they had such a great time that inspired
me further to go into education as a
career
i went to college and then grad school
to be a higher education
administrator as i really wanted to work
in a college environment
and one thing i learned while i was in
school was that
while edutainment was very very popular
among children
i didn’t really see as much of it for
adults why is that
when we grow up should learning no
longer be fun
does it have to get serious i didn’t
think so
so i decided that i needed to fix that
problem and create
edutainment programs for adults the
first thing i did in grad school was
i took once again my virtual life
concepts my
powerpoint template type of game and i
created a college
management simulator you would play the
role of a college president
and make day-to-day decisions that would
help the college run smoothly
it was very well received by my peers
and one instructor i showed it to
a little later i was very involved in
theater and i enjoyed acting in plays
so i decided to write a play i wrote a
play a situational comedy
that took place inside a college and it
followed four
young college students getting into a
bunch of hijinks but also teaching you
about the day-to-day lives of college
life
the show was produced three times in
three different locations
viewed by both college goers and
non-college goers alike
they loved it there were glowing reviews
and they had a great time
but i had a problem while i can see that
people enjoyed all these works
i had no idea if they were learning and
learning is a crucial part of
edutainment
so i decided that my next program had to
have some kind of measure of learning
for the longest time i wanted to write a
book
it’s one of those things where you
procrastinate for years but i decided
this will be it
this will be the edutainment program
that i do next
so i wrote a mystery novel it had all of
your traditional mystery novel tropes
it had murders and deception and a twist
but interspersed through all of that
it also had little images of college
life
it followed various first-year college
students as they got
comfortable and they transitioned into
the college atmosphere
so taking this novel that i wrote and
published i then grabbed a group of high
school students
and i wanted to do a study all of
them were high school so they hadn’t
gone to college yet
and over the span of two weeks i had
them read this book
i tested them on their college knowledge
before reading the book
and then after reading the book and what
i found was
there was a lot of learning that
happened in those two weeks just in
those two weeks
these students learned more about making
friends about living in a dorm
talking to professors paying for college
dealing with stress
all things from just two weeks
but that’s not even the most interesting
part the most interesting part of the
study
was that the students that learned the
most or had the most drastically
changed views were the ones most
invested in the story
one particular girl a hispanic girl
afterwards had told me that she related
very strongly
to a hispanic girl in the novel named
gabriella
now gabriella was a very quiet girl and
for many parts of the book just
struggled to make friends because of her
quiet nature
so this student told me that she really
related to gabriella because she was
just like her and she was invested to
see what happened to her throughout the
rest of the story
now as someone who has taught workshops
on how to break out of your shell and
how to make friends
that is very hard to teach when they’re
not invested in learning
and she was invested one of the hardest
obstacles was passed
that is the power of edutainment
so why don’t we see so much
entertainment particularly for adults
two reasons or two thoughts that i may
have
one is money i talk to many educators
about edutainment and they tell me oh i
love the concept but it’s too expensive
to buy those programs
can’t argue with that ready-made
edutainment programs are expensive
but we’re all creative to some degree we
all have some kind of passion
can’t we just make our own programs
and then comes the second point time
we’re all busy we are we’re doing so
much with so little time
and it’s easier to go with the status
quo we have ready-made programs
ready-made curriculum
why why fix what isn’t broken
but imagine if we were to just implement
some edutainment
programs here and there and i’m not just
talking teachers
i’m talking community leaders i’m
talking parents it doesn’t have to be in
the classroom
there are so many opportunities for
implementation and as technology evolves
it allows us to create so many more
programs
to conclude edutainment is going nowhere
it’s going to be here more and more and
more and as more phone apps are
developed
and as more opportunities come about we
will be seeing it
so could you imagine if we supplemented
traditional education
and i say supplemented not replaced
because traditional education is still
important it has its value and has its
place
but if we supplement it with some
edutainment programs
could you imagine what could happen
maybe
just maybe you could inspire someone to
have a love of learning
that wasn’t there maybe
you could be someone’s next hat day
thank you
[Music]
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